Not detected. The online scanner did not identify the website which contained material that had been plagiarised.

Basic plagiarism – copied and pasted from an electronic book

Not detected. The online scanner correctly identified the electronic book which contained material that had been plagiarised.

General observationsEase of use, overall experience. If other features were included (e.g. spelling, grammar check), how easy were they to use and how useful were they?

Checkforplagiarism.net's website is a flashy bells and whistles affair. It's advertised widely across the internet and when you arrive on its homepage you're greeted with a wealth of information – and this is quite overwhelming. To its credit, however, it doesn't make bold unsubstantiated claims like other websites about its scanner being the best in the world.Using checkforplagiarism.net's plagiarism checker is expensive – it's the second most expensive scanner on the internet at the time of writing, and their basic option alone costs $20. Because of this, it really tries to sell it on its webpage:"Paying for any service that has a free alternative sounds like a silly thing to do, at first. But consider the advantages that those few dollars will get you: Comprehensive and structured checking and cross matching against billions of websites and papers submitted worldwide; checking against blog entries, paid site articles, journals, books and magazines; availability of multiple languages to check in; Checking not just for a simple text match but a comprehensive synonym and sentence structure match, both automated and manually."

However, a lot of the features described are available across a range of free checkers. Additionally, it's not strictly true that any manual checking takes place – the process is fully automated and no human intervention is involved – again like all the other scanners available online.

There is no free trial and users who want to try the scanner are required to sign up to a basic account costing $20. This will allow up to five scans so each one is worth $4 each – again, this is expensive when compared to other options available.

The plagiarism scanner itself is simple to use; clear instructions take the user through the process step-by-step and scans usually take less than a minute (for smaller documents). However, it didn't perform well at all, only detecting plagiarism in half the sample documents. In tests, it detected straightforward "copy and paste' plagiarism and a plagiarised pdf. It also spotted the plagiarism of a website where some of the words had been changed, but not from a website where some words had been removed. It also failed to detect paraphrased work and an ebook which had been plagiarised.

Checkforplagiarism.net is very good at advertising. It is not, however, very good at detecting plagiarism and should therefore be avoided. There are, after all, free options available which perform better.